Amazon reportedly planning to introduce hand-scanning for payments

Apple and Google make it easy to leave your wallet be when it’s time to pay at the register, but now there are murmurs about factoring out your smartphone as well.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon shops and other merchants could offer a hand-based payment system. Your credit card or account info would be linked to your palms, so when checking out you’d just put out your hand. Scan it and you’re set.

The terminals could be used at any store, not just Amazon-owned ones. Early talks with financial institutions suggest the powers-that-be are mulling connecting customer payment info to the hand-readers.

Back in September the New York Post reported on a hand-scanning check-out system coming to Amazon-owned stores like Whole Foods. The Post said the scan would cut down checkout time to 300 milliseconds. 

An Amazon patent filed in 2018 and published in December detailed a “non-contact biometric identification system” that “includes a hand scanner that generates images of a user’s palm. Images are acquired using light of a first polarization at a first time show surface characteristics such as wrinkles in the palm while images acquired using light of a second polarization at a second time show deeper characteristics such as veins.”

Basically, it’s a very thorough scan of your palms that would be connected to a credit card or other payment method. You wouldn’t have to touch any surface like with Touch ID on Apple iPhones.  Amazon Go stores are cashier-less, but to enter you have to swipe an app on a phone. This would eliminate that step, possibly replacing the app with a quick hand scan to enter.

The logistics still have to be worked. And opportunity for abuse and fraud is still possible, and an open question. We reached out to Amazon for more on the hand-scanners, but nothing to report back yet. The company declined to comment to the WSJ. Now that’s a “talk to the hand” moment.